


the democracy of sleep

by liketheroad



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-17 21:53:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liketheroad/pseuds/liketheroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Arthur loves Dom and Mal, despite knowing he will never be a half of their whole. Also in which Eames exhibits admirable patience while waiting for Arthur to realize he has options other than spending his whole life loving two people who can never love him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the democracy of sleep

Cobb; prologue

He’s languishing in a post-doc, uninterested in leaving the confines of the university, unwilling to step outside of the shadow of the mentor who has become more like a father, unable to part with the lover he’s found in the man’s daughter.

His duties include teaching one course in addition to continuing his own research into multiple levels of dreams. He’s collaborating with Mal, who started as his lab assistant and is now his partner in all things. Strictly speaking she’s his chemist, a daring and imaginative scientist. Together they search for the right mix of compounds, kicks, and architecture to produce infinite layers of dreams within dreams.

When he isn’t dreaming with Mal, he researches and teaches his course on advanced extraction techniques and protection form same. It’s a small class, graduate students exclusively, save one exception. The exception is Arthur, an undergraduate with so much potential he argues his way into the class through a dream it takes Dom almost 15 minutes to realize he’s in.

Arthur is young and brilliant and the most stubborn person Dom has ever met, including himself, including Mal. Dom thinks he would have fallen in love with Arthur instantly if there was any part of himself left that didn’t already belong to Mal.

Despite the nature of his studies, Dom still dreams, and all his dreams are of her.

\---

Arthur; part one

Arthur learns what extraction is from a military recruiter when he’s a few weeks shy of his 18th birthday. Something about the combination of his test scores, choice of electives, psychological profile and after school activities seems to indicate to the US military that he would excel at stealing secrets out of state enemies’ dreams. The recruiter talks to him about travel opportunities and women, weaves him a tale of his future as the next James Fucking Bond. He tells Arthur they think he could be the best, better than anyone who has come before him, better than the best the world has seen yet. Better than Dominic Cobb.

At the end, he thanks Arthur for his time. Arthur smiles and shakes the man’s hand. He doesn’t sign anything. He doesn’t plan to.

Instead, as soon as he gets home, Arther starts doing research. He finds out the truths and lies behind what the recruiter had told him, finds out the places he needs to go to teach himself the basics of shared dreaming, architecture, extraction. He spends months training his own subconscious, dreaming up new protections for his own mind.

A little less than a year later, he applies to go study in Paris with the legendary Dominic Cobb.

\---

Cobb tells them to call him Dom, because there are no formalities between people sharing dreams.

He tells the course is pass/fail, and that he doesn’t expect more than two of them to make it through.

At this announcement, Arthur sits up a little straighter in his desk, scans the room, immediately sizing up his competition. He’s years younger and has had fewer years of training than every one of his classmates, but in his head he’s already compiling ways to beat them.

\---

He harasses Dom everyday after class, already knowing before Dom can say so that the real stuff, the important stuff, is never going to get explained to him in a lecture hall.

For some reason Cobb humors him, maybe because he’s still rewarding Arthur’s brazen entry into his dreams, maybe because he sees in Arthur what Arthur sees in Dom. Potential. A challenge.

Whatever the reason, Dom lets Arthur become his shadow, lets Arthur accompany him on long winding walks around the campus and the city. Most importantly, Dom lets Arthur follow him into his dreams.

\---

The first time he meets Mal, it’s in a dream. Arthur is the dreamer, Dom is the subject, and when she shows up, at first, Arthur thinks Mal is just a projection. But Dom looks so startled to see her, so pleased, that Arthur knows he must be real. When Dom laughs and catches her in his arms, it’s not like anything Arthur’s ever seen.

“You must be the famous Mal,” he says, trying to convey the appropriate amount of respect and warmth that he feels should be extended to someone he’s heard his mentor speak of with nothing but reverence.

She smiles at him, and the dream stutters slightly, the world around them shaking, just for an instant.

“And _you_ must be the famous Arthur,” she replies, her voice playful, but kind. “Dom almost never stops talking about you, these days.”

Dom makes no attempt to deny it, but he does pull Mal a little closer, kissing the side of her neck; the first of many intimate moments Arthur will be silently invited to observe, but never participate in.

After a beginning like, Arthur thinks, later, he really should have seen the rest coming.

\---

He has coffee with Mal a few weeks after meeting her in his dream.

She’s even more lovely in person.

She’s waiting for Dom, ostensibly, and so is he, a coffee date he apparently arranged for both of them, but had no intention of showing up to himself.

“He’s never late, not if he’s actually planning to arrive,” Mal enlightens him, laughing fondness in her voice.

“Why?” He thinks about being more specific, Arthur tends to crave specificity, but he finds himself too curious, sitting here with her, to do anything to narrow the range of answers she might give him.

She gives him a knowing little look, like she already has him all figured out, and then follows it up with a smile, like she likes him anyway.

“Dom is very reliable, but only if he thinks a particular commitment is worth keeping, and only when he’s not working. Then it’s impossible to get him to think about anything else, and the only way to be with him is not to try.”

She’s telling him this like it’s extremely important information for him to have, like she’s giving him tools for survival, and he doesn’t understand why. He aspires to be more, certainly, but he’s just a student. He barely knows Dom, has little reason to think he should be included in their confidences.

“What is he working on right now?” Arthur asks next, because he can’t decide how to address the implications behind what she’s trying to tell him, and because he’s genuinely dying to know.

Mal tucks her shoulders up by her chin, a strange but pleased seeming gesture, and then she leans closer, placing her hand over his, and starts telling him about Dom’s new theory about what exists at the bottom of dreams, what comes after everything else. She holds his hand in the sunlit patio of Dom’s favorite cafe, and tells Arthur in a soft and conspiratorial tone about a place they’re calling _limbo_.

\---

Mal is the one who teaches him how to dress. She never takes him shopping, or gives him tips, nothing like that, but she’s the one who teaches him the importance of appearances. It’s through her example that he learns the power than can flow from the perfectly selected wardrobe, the way that can shield, deflect. She teaches him to use his beauty, to accentuate the best parts of himself, to find serenity and control within a well-chosen tie and an expertly tailored three-piece suit.

In those early days, he learns more from Mal than he thinks he ever will from Dom. Dom is the one who teaches him how to steal the secrets from other people’s dreams, how to flit undetected in and out of a foreign consciousness. Dom teaches him all that, teaches him how to feel at home in dreams, but Mal is the one who teaches Arthur how to fit inside his own skin while he’s awake.

\---

He’s the only one in Cobb’s class that doesn’t quit half-way through the semester. When Arthur walks through the classroom door the day after final deadline to avoid getting a grade penalty, it’s just Dom standing there to meet him.

Arthur is careful not to let his triumph show on his face, but he knows Dom is smirking at him as he walks over to take his regular seat; front row, middle.

After standing behind the lectern staring at him silently for a few minutes, Dom shakes his head, and comes to sit down beside Arthur in the adjacent desk.

Just for an instant, he puts his hand on Arthur’s shoulder. Before he can react, Dom’s hand is gone.

Another long silence occurs before Dom finally says, “I think it’s about time you and I left the classroom behind, don’t you?”

\---

After that, there’s only them. Only Dom, and Mal, and dreams. Only the world they create together, the world they teach him to know every inch of. They teach him all the tricks they know, and he comes up with a few more of his own. He spends an entire summer obsessed with paradoxes, and he builds dreams out of nothing but penrose steps and other means of distorting perception so completely he gets lost in dreams for days.

They always dream together, subjects in each other’s dreams, building mazes to lose each other in, to find one another within again.

\---

The first time he goes to Dom and Mal’s flat for dinner, he realizes he’s in love with them both.

He’s been their countless times, but always to dream, splayed out on the living room floor, lying like three sardines in a row. He’s used their bathroom and slept, unaided, on their living room couch. He’s seen traces of their childhood homes and most precious memories in their dreams.

But it’s never been quite like this. He’s never been invited over for a dinner, never so deliberately, so formerly. He’s never sat with them while Edith Piaf played and the world outside they three seemed to disappear, as if nothing existed outside of what they could imagine.

He’s known them for two years, and has probably loved them for every minute of it.

In the extraction world, smaller and stranger than the more typically eccentric academic environments, his relationship with them, his closeness to Mal as well as Dom, has never struck him as inappropriate, or too forward. As his protege, Arthur has already spent years learning Dom’s mind. There was no way to learn Dom’s without understanding Mal’s as well. By the time his training is complete, they will have no secrets from each other.

He considers this as he considers the love for them that has presented suddenly itself to him as a pure and whole discovery. He wonders if they’ve already guessed, if they could have known this about him before he learned it himself.

He thinks maybe they haven’t, decides it’s unlikely that either of them would have taken the time to notice something so intimate that wasn’t about the other. They love each other in a way he’s never seen, so clearly two halves of a whole, and he knows instantly, as surely as he knows he loves them, that there will never be space for him between them.

But as they raise their glasses to him, faces bright with smiles illuminated by the flickering candlelight, Arthur thinks he can be content, thinks he can be happy, so long as he can still have this. So long as he can still have them in his dreams.

\---

They’re in a dream, Mal’s dream, on the shore of a river flowing in two directions. Mal is wearing a white sundress, her bare legs dangling in the water, her sunhat abandoned at her side. Dom is dressed as he always is in her dreams, in loose fitting tweed trousers and a white button-up shirt rolled up around his elbows. His clothes are held together with suspenders, and he’s chewing on a piece of grass, squinting at the sun. He looks like a former reincarnation of himself, like a Dom from several lifetimes ago. Unlike in reality, his face is clean shaven, and it makes him look younger, even though Arthur knows from experience that the only thing Mal takes liberties with in her dreams are the very most surface details. Arthur’s outfit closely mirrors Dom’s, but unlike Dom, he hasn’t abandoned his shoes and shocks, and he’s sitting his legs crossed neatly instead of hanging languidly into the water.

Mal says, “Have you worked out where I’m keeping it yet?” and only then does Arthur remember he’s here with them for a lesson, here to find whatever secret Mal has hidden within Dom’s mind.

He already has it, he never would have allowed his own mind to wander otherwise, but he hasn’t told them, because that would mean the end of the dream, and he doesn’t want it to end. He never does, when it’s the three of them. By now, they both know why, but they never speak of it, not to him, not to each other. Sometimes he can see the knowledge in their eyes, along with something wistful and close to sadness, and he knows it means they love him enough to regret what they can not give him. Most of the time that’s enough.

Mal touches his chin, tilting his face towards hers, and he smiles, a rare moment where he allows his happiness to show with his teeth.

“Dom thinks you’ve already found it,” she says, her voice warm and light with teasing.

“He’s found it,” Dom affirms confidently, and Arthur feels a thrum of pleasure at the pride in Dom’s voice.

“Inside the tree trunk where we had lunch, hours ago,” he admits, handing over the paper crane Mal had hidden for him to find.

She applauds, and kisses his cheek. “Well done, Arthur. But did you look inside?”

Arthur frowns, triumph twisting instantly into frustration. He takes the crane back from her and unfolds it carefully. Inside is a ring.

He looks up at her blankly; she smiles and slips the ring onto her finger.

“Dom has asked me to marry him,” she tells him, and he realizes this is a different kind of test than he’d previously imagined.

“Why hide the ring for me to find? Why not just tell me before we went into the dream?” His own confusion surprises him, frustrates him.

He isn’t surprised that they’ve finally decided to get married, that has seemed an inevitability since the dream in which he first met Mal. He shouldn’t even be surprised that they’re telling him in a dream instead of reality, experience should have taught him better than that. They are always their most honest in dreams.

“One doesn’t always choose what to hide, Arthur, you know that,” Mal chides him gently, her ringed finger now interlaced with Dom’s.

“Your projections helped me find it, though,” Arthur says, looking at both of them searchingly, wondering at the point of a deception when that was the case.

Dom raises an interested eye-brow, “Did they?” he smiles distantly, the way he always does when something new has surprised him, when he’s been presented with another puzzle to solve.

Whenever they dream together, neither Mal nor Dom’s protections ever turn on the other. Even in dreams, they are wholly in sync, too united for their too united for their subconsciouses to recognize the other as a foreign threat to recognize the other as a foreign threat. In this dream, a pair of children, projections of something Arthur knew Dom hoped for, had helped him find the crane, had laughed and pulled him along by the hands. A third child had distracted Dom and Mal while Arthur slipped his hand inside the tree and found what Mal’s mind had already hidden there.

He tells them as much, and Mal applauds again, and Dom leans back on his elbows, regarding the imagined sky above them thoughtfully.

“Our minds never behave quite how they should,” he murmurs, not troubled by it, at least not in anything but an academic sense, “not when we’re dreaming together.”

“That’s because we’re special, Dom,” Mal says simply, shrugging her bare, tan shoulders.

“And Arthur?” Dom asks, smiling like he already knows the answer to his question.

Mal smiles back, and leans her head against Arthur’s shoulder as she says, “Arthur is the most special of all.”

\---

Dom and Mal get married, and Arthur is their best man. They get married in the chapel of the university, a short and lovely ceremony attended only by Arthur and Mal’s parents. Where Dom came from, or what has become of any family he may have had before he moved to Paris, are the only secrets Arthur still doesn’t know.

He stands behind them, facing the priest who marries them, and no one is standing closer when they lean in to share their first kiss as a married couple.

When they part lips, Mal smiles and hands Arthur her bouquet.

\---

He’s made godfather to their first child, a beautiful girl they call Phillipa, and then assumes the role again with their second, a boy they call James in his honor, borrowing Arthur’s last name.

By the time James is born, Arthur has a degree that says he knows everything there is to know about extraction, about building dreamscapes, about defense. He graduates at the top of his class, he graduates as the only member of his class. As the last student Dom saw enough potential in to take on. With Dom’s references, Arthur could work anywhere in the world, an array of commissions of varying degrees of legality are at his fingertips.

He chooses to go into business with Mal and Dom.

He spends weeks at a time living in the spare bedroom of their new home, taking turns making meals and looking after the children in between planning for jobs. He becomes their point man, the one they trust to realize Dom’s vision, to pull the pieces together into something doable, something that can be efficiently executed and controlled. They choose jobs based on the level of challenge they offer, not the money. They take jobs to test themselves, to test each other.

They spend so much time in dreams that those first two years feel like ten. Whenever they’re awake, whenever they’re at home, James and Phillipa ask for Arthur as much as they do their own parents.

\---

When James is three, Dom and Mal decide to move to the states, to Los Angeles.

They don’t consult with him first, but he knows it’s assumed that he’ll go with them.

He packs his bags and boards a plane without giving it a second thought.

\---

In all that time, they remain extremely careful with him, always so precise in their movements, in their thoughts towards him. Mal is affectionate, French, and in dreams her her hands and lips ghost across his skin thoughtlessly, but she is much more guarded outside of her dreams, and never touches him in Dom’s, or his own. In reality, Dom almost never reaches out to him. It’s only in the most extreme of moments, in the midst of great danger or in the flush of unexpected success, that he will occasionally touch Arthur. Even in those rare moments, the slightest passing squeeze of Arthur’s shoulder is the most Arthur knows he can hope for. Small, inconsequential seeming touches, but they mean the world to Arthur. They are what he treasures most, because he knows that Dom will only ever touch him when they’re awake, a better totem than any inanimate object could ever be.

\---

They take an extraction job inside the mind of a schizophrenic, despite the hours Arthur spends trying to shout down the idea. He gives in, because in the end he always gives in to Dom; it’s always two against one anyway. Arthur jokes that it’s the tyranny of the majority, but they all know it’s really the tyranny of his heart, his inability to say no to either of them.

The first time they go inside the girl’s head, the daughter of an Italian diplomat who told her all his secrets before he died, her projections kill them before they even have a chance to find her within the dream. After that, Arthur tries again to convince Dom the job can’t be done, but he’s determined, too thrilled by the challenge to give up, and Mal is just the same.

They spend weeks planning their second attempt. Mal mixes them sedatives to create dreamscapes stable enough to provide for three levels, three dreams within dreams, and they don’t enter the girl’s subconscious mind until the last.

They get the information, after Arthur has his lungs ripped out by one of her projections, and Dom has been drowned by several more.

When they wake up, Arthur’s chest still feels empty, hollowed out, but Dom is smiling triumphantly, eyes blazing, not simply from the success of their mission, but from an idea Arthur is frightened to see growing in Dom’s mind. They’ve gone deeper than they’d ever thought possible in order to reach a part of the girl’s mind that was still partially in tact, but Arthur knows that won’t be enough for Dom now.

He knows Dom will want to go deeper, and he knows that Dom will take Mal with him.

\---

He doesn’t stay with them after that mission, doesn’t follow them into the house as he has so many times before it. Instead, he walks up the path of their house as normal, but when they get to the door he kisses each of them on the cheek and then turns to talk away from them.

\---

Dom calls him three days later. They’ve been under the whole time. Dom sounds completely different; he has become a stranger. He tells Arthur they were in limbo. He tells Arthur they were there for over 50 years.

After a long silence, he tells Arthur that something is wrong with Mal.

\---

Mal won’t talk to him, anymore. She won’t touch Phillipa or James.

She doesn’t believe any of them are real.

\---

Arthur takes several jobs working with different crews, he travels to cities he’s never even heard of, he works with criminals. He dies over and over in dreams.

He meets a thief and a forger named Eames in a basement poker game in Istanbul that turns out to be a warehouse in Port-au-Prince. He realizes half-way through the game that he doesn’t remember getting there, but he lets the game play out anyway, the same reckless anger that drove him this far pressing against his chest, making him want to push further, go deeper. Even if he’s not his teacher anymore, he can still follow Dom’s lead.

When the dream ends it turns out the only real things in it were he and Eames, and he lets Eames take his winnings out on the bed of a hotel room Arthur pretends not to see Eames break into.

When he wakes up, it’s to a call from Dom telling him Mal is dead. He feels nothing; Mal has been dead for months, her body has just been haunting Dom’s waking hours, letting him pretend.

Dom explains the letter Mal wrote, and Arthur immediately tells Dom that he needs to run, already planning where he will get the papers Dom needs, how he will send them without any trace. Dom listens to his instructions without interruption, and agrees to meet Arthur in Argentina in two weeks time.

It’s only after he hangs up the phone that Arthur realizes Eames is already gone. In fact, there is no trace he was ever there; save a single red die sitting on the bedside table. Arthur picks it, feels the weight of it in his palm. It’s clearly loaded, poised to always drop on four, and with a wry smile, Arthur realizes the secret to Eames’s success at the games the night before.

He gets out of bed, and dresses quickly. Without a moment’s pause, he pockets the die, and leaves his old totem, a fountain pen Mal and Dom gave him for his graduation that never wrote in his dreams, behind.

Arthur; part two

He introduces Dom to the same element, Dom calls it, as Arthur had fallen into in the months before Mal’s death.

They start taking jobs for the money, for the connections to powerful people success might bring. They rarely stay in the same country, the same continent, for more than a few weeks at a time. Whenever they’re not working, Dom disappears until a new opportunity presents itself.

While Dom’s gone, lost, Arthur always goes back to Los Angeles to look after James and Phillipa. He’s never received very warmly by Mal’s mother, who has them most of the time. Despite her dislike for him, and whatever she thinks he represents in the loss of her daughter, that doesn’t stop her from wanting to see her grandchildren happy, and Arthur has it on fairly good authority that seeing him walk through the door is one of the only things that makes them smile, anymore.

He reads them stories at night, or makes them up, sharing memories of their parents only he knows. He walks them to school in the mornings and picks them up in the afternoon. He conspires with Phillipa to gain permission to adopt a kitten, and is the one who teaches James how to ride a bike.

Sometimes, at the end of a long day, they each sit on his knee while he calls Dom, talking in half-coded sentences, neither of them ever saying they missed the other, never saying they missed Mal.

Every time he leaves them, he’s afraid it’s going to be the last time he hugs them goodbye. Every time he comes back he wishes he’ll never have to leave them again.

\---

After a few months, Mal starts following them into the dreams. She kills Arthur whenever she gets the chance; usually after torturing him first.

He doesn’t let himself think about what that means.

\---

They’re in Dubai, the midst of searching for a reliable forger for their next job, but they’ve had a job or two go badly there before, at least partly courtesy of Mal, and none of their regular contacts will speak to them. In a moment of weakness, unwittingly combined with professionalism, Arthur tells Dom about Eames.

Arthur followed up on him after their first encounter. Call it professional curiosity.

“His reputation is pretty exaggerated, but he’s good at what he does. He can steal and cheat and I’m pretty sure he’s shown up in at least two of our recent jobs as a blond bombshell with a habit of distracting our marks at opportune moments.”

Dom raises both eyebrows, “Is that what that was?”

Arthur shrugs, a little defensively, “What did you think? That we suddenly had _two_ rogue projections on our hands?”

Dom flinches; it’s the closest Arthur has come yet to mentioning what’s been happening with Mal.

“I’m more concerned with how he got in, and what his motivations might be, at the moment,” Dom says a little sharply, using the tone that still, will probably always, make every fibre of Arthur hop to attention.

Whatever else he’s become, whatever else he’s done, Dom is still the man who helped Arthur realize his potential, the man who taught Arthur there was so much more to reality than what could be experienced in one’s waking hours or in the chaos of unaided dreams. He’s still half of the only thing Arthur has ever loved.

“I think it was a test,” Arthur explains, wondering at himself why he feels so sure, so calm about the invasion, when he only met Eames the once, and under decidedly less than ideal conditions.

“A test?” Dom repeats, frowning.

Arthur nods, “Yeah, a test for us, an audition for him.”

Dom thinks it over, “If he’s as good as you say, why would he bother seeking us out like that? I’d think he’d be able to work with whoever he wanted.”

Arthur found himself smiling, “He probably can. I think he just might be crazy enough that he wants to work with us, is all.”

\---

Dom stops building, and things get a little better. It’s far from ideal, but Mal stops finding her way into all of their dreams, even if she still manages to get into most. She also takes to making fewer attempts to torture him, which Arthur appreciates.

The problem, another one of them, anyway, is that no one is as good as Dom used to be, and despite other limitations of their current situation, Dom and Arthur are still used to working with the best. They end up leaving a string of disgruntled architects in their wake, rarely working with anyone for more than one or two jobs.

The only person they do start working with with some regularity is Eames, because he is the best, Arthur was right about that. He was right about Eames being crazy, too.

\---

Sometimes they go out drinking, after a successful job. Sometimes they skip the pretense entirely and simply find the closest hotel room that’s up to Arthur’s standards and spend the next string of days fucking until Arthur inevitably comes to his senses and gets on a plane to fly back to L.A., back to the children that will never be his.

The first time it happens, Arthur has just seen Dom off at a private airplane hanger in Prague, and he turns around to find Eames lingering behind him, arms crossed like he’s been waiting there all day.

“Fancy a drink?” He asks, his grin somehow softer than usual, voice gentle where Arthur is accustomed to it being mocking.

Maybe it’s that, that unexpected moment of unguarded kindness, and not just the lost, rudderless feeling he always gets when Dom leaves, that makes Arthur say yes.

\---

Eames always insists on putting Arthur’s suit jacket back on for him after they’ve finally dragged themselves out of bed.

It goes like this. Arthur gets up first, typically nursing a headache from too much alcohol, not enough food, or both. He locks himself in the bathroom and showers, cursing himself, and then exists to find Eames suddenly awake and waiting for him, eyes nakedly taking every inch of Arthur in. Arthur always gets dressed like that, putting himself back together while Eames watches. He never interferes, never says a word, not until Arthur has finished buttoning up his shirt and tightening his tie. Then Eames always gets up, pads barefoot across the room, and carefully picks Arthur’s jacket up from where he has hung in on the back of a chair.

He shocked himself, the first time it happened, that by allowing Eames to get close enough to put his jacket back on, to smooth the shoulders and take a step back to regard him, checking for imperfections. It had felt incongruous, more intimate than of the other things he and Eames had done to each other, and Arthur had sworn he wouldn’t let it happen again.

But now Arthur always waits, breath caught in his throat, for Eames to complete his task for him.

For all that he tells himself their indiscretions mean nothing, thoughtless, hedonistic pleasure he wishes he were strong enough to resist, Arthur has the hardest time pretending he feels nothing in those final moments they spend together. Pretending that he doesn’t spend their whole time together waiting, longing for those few minutes couched in silent ritual as Eames touches him so softly, so deliberately that Arthur can see in himself, just for a moment, all that Eames seems to.

\---

They work a few jobs together without Dom, and it feels like the most rebellious thing Arthur has ever done. He doesn’t even tell Dom about them, not before, not after. Not even when their latest escapade almost kills Arthur while he’s wide awake.

Dom knows, of course, their world isn’t large enough for him not to, but he never says anything to Arthur about it directly. No, he doesn’t say a word, but after the job goes bad in Venice, Dom’s the one who calls him about meeting up. A first time for everything.

When they meet in a crowded cafe, Dom gets out of his seat, and pulls Arthur into a crushing hug that escalates into a kiss. It goes on so long Arthur almost forgets why they’ve never done this. He loses himself to the heat of Dom’s body against his.

“Don’t let me lose you too,” Dom says, once they break apart, hands still gripping Arthur’s face.

His answer is automatic, visceral, “I won’t.”

Before he lets Arthur go, Dom presses another hard kiss to his forehead. It feels like a promise he knows Dom can’t keep.

\---

He avoids Eames after that, deflects Dom on the rare occasions he reluctantly brings up hiring the forger. Despite their shared perfectionism, the nagging knowledge that no one else they find to hire will be quite as good as Eames, Dom always relents to Arthur’s vague objections. Neither of them are eager to upset the fragile balance they’re only beginning to find with one another again.

They don’t see Eames for almost three years.

\---

Mal shoots him in the leg, and then Dom shoots him in the head.

It pretty much all goes downhill from there.

\---

The low-point, however, is unquestionably when Dom insists on calling Eames in for a job Arthur still doesn’t believe can be done.

\---

Or maybe it’s when Miles’s new star pupil turns out to be a better architect than Dom, and Arthur sees a flicker of interest in Dom’s eyes the likes of which he hasn’t seen since Mal’s death.

\---

No. The the worst of it isn’t when Eames proves him wrong, or when Ariadne does what he has never quite been able to make Dom do since Mal’s death. When she makes him really stop, just for a second, when she makes him _look_.

The worst is when Arthur fails them all, only to realize that Dom didn’t trust him enough to share all the risks the inception job entailed. When he learns that Dom didn’t trust Arthur to follow him into the dreams anyway.

\---

They don’t die; they don’t get stuck in limbo.

Dom doesn’t get arrested in LAX; there are no snipers waiting for him when he walks through the front door of the home he left behind years ago.

They go home together, and Phillipa races into Arthur’s arms while James clings to his father’s legs.

Dom smiles at Arthur over his son’s head as he picks James up and cradles him close. Arthur hugs Phillipa tight and looks away.

\---

He stays with Dom and the children for a month.

On the night before he plans to leave, Dom sends the kids away to stay with their grandmother. It’s the first time he’s let them out of his sight since he’s been back.

He makes dinner while Arthur waits anxiously in the living room, flipping through a book he can’t bear to read. Something of Mal’s, French poetry. He never told her, in all the years they spent together, that he spoke perfect French. He was always afraid she’s tease him about his accent, learned from a French Canadian nanny who had been like a mother to him, nothing like Mal’s rich and sophisticated Parisian lilt.

He has his suspicions, his fears making him tense, as he waits, but it’s not until Dom calls Arthur to the table that he knows for certain what this is.

The room is full of shadows and warm, flickering candlelight. Arthur’s favorite opera is playing on the record player. Two glasses of wine and two plates of eggplant Parmesan are waiting for them.

Dom has an uncertain, hopeful look in his eyes.

Arthur has to look away, has to close his own eyes and take a long, steadying breath.

When he opens them, Dom is still there, eyes still full of unspoken promise.

Dom walks over, and moves to pull Arthur’s chair out for him, and it breaks what was left of Arthur’s heart to see him trying so hard.

It shouldn’t have to be this hard.

It never was with Mal, but Arthur knows that no matter how long he let Dom try, it would always be this hard with him.

He stops Dom’s hand, shakes his head, and steps back.

Dom makes a small noise of protest, and he moves closer again, his hand suddenly on Arthur’s neck.

“Don’t,” Arthur hears himself say, a warning and a plea.

Dom lets go, but he keeps Arthur leveled with his gaze, keeps him trapped where he stands.

“ _Don’t_ ,” he says again, begging this time.

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” Dom says, finally looking away, freeing Arthur’s limbs.

“I know,” he says, before he walks away.

\---

He gets on a plane, and then another. Then he gets on a bus.

He ends up in Mombasa almost entirely without admitting to himself where he was going, or why.

Still, when he finds Eames lounging against a poker table, arms folded, foot tapping like he’s been expecting him, Arthur admits to himself that he isn’t surprised.

When Eames comes over to him and says chidingly, “You’re late, darling,” before kissing Arthur in half welcome, half reproach, Arthur doesn’t resist.

And when Eames pulls away, Arthur draws him back in, and kisses him again.

He doesn’t check his totem in his pocket; he simply surrenders himself to the kiss, and lets himself believe that this is the start of something new. The start of something real.


End file.
